Customer Service (part 1)

An issue that sometimes is overlooked or not given adequate resources is customer service. I'm going to write a series of posts addressing this important marketing and business function. Its important because for many of your website visitors, a phone call to your customer service is the only human interaction they'll ever have with your company. This first post will address a basic component of customer service which is having all customer data at the drop of a dime.

Occasionally, I'll buy a product from a small business because they had the best price. It hits me how small they are when I call their customer service phone number to follow up on an order. I'm left on the phone waiting while the agent digs through paper to find my order or has to call me because all the knowledge resides in the mind of an individual who is at lunch. As a customer, I expect to get answers to basic questions when I contact customer service because that's what I've come to expect when dealing with more well known companies. Its not out of line to expect the same from a small business becasue at the end of the day that business took my money for a product or service I expect to receive. A negative customer service experience can drive away a new customer or a long time customer. One bad call is all it takes.

One way to streamline your customer service operations is to implement and integrate a CRM tool with your ecommerce platform. At many small businesses, the staff wears many hats and its not uncommon to have a designer or other person fielding customer service calls. How much more productive can your staff be if they had the proper tools?

I use SugarCRM because it works, its open source and its comparable to other expensive solutions. At a previous position, I implemented SugarCRM for my customer service team and the results were incredible.

First, my costs went down. My phone bills went down because customers weren't sitting on the 800# while my staff went looking for information. It drove down cost on outbound calls becasue we addressed customer needs immediately. It also improved my revenue contribution per employee ratio because my staff could immediately address customer issues while spending more time on revenue generating activities (i.e. home page refreshes, paid search placements, etc.).

Second, it improved the customer's perception of my brand and turned potentially negative situations into positive ones. Customers will always recognize you when you do the right thing. Part of doing the right thing is having all the information at hand to make a good decision. It also allowed any one of my staffers to properly address a customer issue by having all the customers notes at hand. It didn't matter if one person initially took the call because that person put all the notes into the CRM tool.

Third, it housed all my customer data in one easy to access application. I could access Sugar CRM and segment my customer list based on any number of parameters I chose and market to those folks with relevant email blasts, mailers or package inserts.

Finally, contrary to popular belief, it's not expensive to have an enterprise level CRM tool or to integrate. Contact us at info@mjmecommerce.com or visit http://www.mjmecommerce.com/ and I'll tell you how to make this solution work for you. Check back soon for Part Two!